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THE 2003 VICTOR TURNER PRIZE The Society for Humanistic Anthropology is pleased to announce the winners of The 2003 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. This year there were a record number 79 entries for the competition, which was judged by past SHA President Barbara Babcock (Arizona) [chair], Lawrence Cohen (UC-Berkeley) [Victor Turner Prize winner, 1998], and Margaret Wiener (UNC-Chapel Hill) [Victor Turner Prize winner, 1995]. With so many fine books, it was “amazingly difficult” narrowing the field from 79 to 5. After agonizing over ranking and reducing that final five to the conventional three--1 winner and 2 honorable mentions--we agreed that we couldn’t, except to concur that the winner was either Klima or Raffles or both. Both it was, creating a classificatory embarrassment that Vic would have liked, and Honorable Mentions to the other three.
Alan Klima earned his PhD. in anthropology at
Princeton and is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC-Davis.
The Funeral Casino is his first book, eloquently expressing his
research concerns with “pro-democracy activism in Thailand, military
massacre, and the political effects of the representation of death in
public media and political ritual.” His brilliant exposition of the
representation of the unrepresentable, of the abject, and of the power
of such images well beyond their bodily visibility moves between
Buddhist meditation on death and Walter Benjamin’s theory of “mechanical
reproduction.” Klima’s “astoundingly original work,” which he describes
both as “philosophical ethnography” and as an “imaginary work of prose”
is also about exchange, about the traffic in death that is not confined
to northern Thai funeral casinos. As he points out in the last chapter,
“the obligation to continually reform society, as return on the gift of
death, is a debt we all share.” Michael Taussig has aptly described
The Funeral Casino as “an amazing book that makes you rethink your
body and the body politic . . . a stirring endorsement of anthropology
as a radical discipline.” Hugh Raffles is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC-Santa Cruz. He received a Master’s in Latin American Studies at the University of London, and a PhD. in Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale. In Amazonia is also a stunning first book and a wonderful read that “has a great deal to offer those knowing everything or nothing about the Amazon.” This is natural history of a different kind–one that challenges us to rethink what we mean by “nature”. Using historical analysis, environmental study and ethnographic research, Raffles weaves together characters and stories of several centuries to show how humans, animals, rivers, and forests all participate in the making of a region that remains today at the center of debates in environmental politics. The Amazon is not what it seems; its allure as “a paradise of riches,” like that of other powerful and liminal spaces, is perhaps less that of the natural and of the indigenous than of human desire and invention. As Raffles remarked in an interview, “People talk about the Amazon as a natural landscape, but the people who live there have been transforming it forever. It’s much more appropriate to think of the Amazon as a managed landscape, as people are beginning to think about the American West.” HONORABLE MENTIONS Thomas Buckley. Standing Ground: Yurok Indian Spirituality, 1850-1990 (University of California Press, 2002). Thomas (Tim) Buckley earned his PhD. in
anthropology at the University of Chicago, where he studied with Victor
Turner among others. Until he left the University of
Massachusetts-Boston in 2001 to sail and to write as an independent
scholar, he taught Anthropology and American Studies there. Standing
Ground is an innovative ethnography that is the product of 30 years
of fieldwork and friendship with the Yurok Indians of northern
California. Like the other award winners this year, Buckley places
himself in dialogue with a variety of individuals and stories and texts,
thereby portraying Yurok spirituality as “a significant field in which
individual and society meet in dialogue–cooperating, resisting,
negotiating, changing each other in manifold ways.” His previously
published work includes Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation
(1988), an award-winning collection that he co-edited with Alma
Gottlieb, 2003 SHA President and 1993 Victor Turner Prize winner. Michael J. Lambek. The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanqa, Madagascar. Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Michael J. Lambek earned his PhD. in anthropology at the University of Michigan and is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto at Scarborough. His fieldwork in the western Indian Ocean since 1975 has produced “path-finding studies of mediums and spirit possession” of which The Weight of the Past is the third. The previous studies are Human Spirits: A Cultural Account of Trance in Mayotte (1981) and Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery, and Spirit Possession (1993) He has also co-edited several important collections such as Ecology and the Sacred: Engaging the Anthropology of Roy A. Rappaport (2001), with Ellen Messer. In The Weight of the Past, a “brilliant account of the embodied conscience of history,” Lambek, like this year’s other award-winning authors, explores how history shapes, constrains, and enables daily life–the multiple ways that Sakalava “bear” history. The result is a “theoretically innovative, moving and evocative book” that “will reshape debates between anthropology and history.” Lambek is President-elect of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion Text adapted from Return to Society for Humanistic Anthropology Page
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